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England’s teaching unions: alive, but not quite thriving

Decline in political clout has left representative bodies in England ‘marginalised’, claim academics

Is the end nigh for teaching unions in England? That’s the controversial question posed in a new book about education unions around the globe.

It argues that teachers’ unions in England are alone in the Western world in having lost huge amounts of power over the past 30 years.

Is that true? And if that’s the case, is it a cause for regret or – as one prominent US academic suggests – is it a good thing?

The Comparative Politics of Education: Teacher Unions and Education Systems Around the World looks at unions in 11 different countries. The chapter on England, written by Susanne Wiborg, an ...

Unions unite against MAT cuts

In what is being mooted as a sign of things to come, eight unions have joined forces to oppose cuts at multi-academy trusts.

In the space of one week, the unions fired shots across the bows of two academy chains where staffing cuts are on the cards.

The unions involved are GMB, Unison, Unite, the NUT, the ATL, the NAHT, the Association of School and College Leaders and the NASUWT.

First, they warned the David Ross Educational Trust about “possible action” if it goes ahead with plans to cut 40 support jobs. Days later, they issued a joint statement asking the Academies Enterprise Trust to rethink “dangerous” plans to make 34 caretakers redundant.

Jon Richards, Unison’s head of education, says the rise of MATs and the school funding situation have forced the unions “to form tight coalitions”.

He says the ripple effects from support staff cuts have galvanised cooperation between the teacher unions and the big public sector unions.

And he believes the NAHT and ASCL have come on board because “headteachers are seeing that MATs are pulling away their decisionmaking powers”.

Paul Whiteman (pictured), the NAHT’s general secretary-designate, agrees it’s important that when the unions share a view “we should all say so”. “It amplifies that voice and makes the point,” he says.

However, we shouldn’t expect a breakout in general amity among England’s teacher unions just yet – one insider says that inter-union competition “is as great as it ever was”.

But Richards has a stark answer when asked if the unions will continue to take coordinated action when dealing with academy trusts. “Every time a MAT tries to roll us over: yes.”

A truly comprehensive history

Today, few things unite England’s teaching unions more than their opposition to new grammar schools.

But Susanne Wiborg, of the UCL Institute of Education, says it was not always this way. The academic believes that English education history needs to be rewritten to make it clear that the teacher unions originally opposed comprehensive education.

“Usually the standard story – the narrative that you read in education policy studies – is that they were great supporters of a comprehensive education, they were a leader of reform,” she says.

However, when she was “digging into this” in her research for her book The Comparative Politics of Education, she found this was “absolutely wrong”. “They were actually very much strongly against comprehensive education,” she says.

Wiborg asserts that the unions were resistant to change because they were organised along the lines of the tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools.

She went through “thousands of pages” of the NUT teaching union’s journal, The Schoolmaster, in its archives but “not one single editorial was about comprehensive education” until after the reform was introduced, she says.

She also points to a piece by ER Taylor, from the “Joint Four” school leaders’ associations, that appeared in The Schoolmaster in 1965.

“A great deal of educational harm could be done if teachers were expected to abandon their devotion to a particular type of school or a particular type of pupil,” he wrote.

However, Wiborg does say that the NUT fought steadfastly in defence of comprehensive education after it became inevitable and once it was under way.

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